BuddyPress.org

I started with a hand-coded HTML blog where I got my feet wet with HTML and CSS back in 2004 (or earlier possibly). But when I moved from my own self-hosted server to a real web host, I found that there was actual blogging software you could install. I started playing with b2evolution and nucleus in 2005, the former seeming superior to WordPress from what I was reading online.
In early 2006, I installed WordPress for the first time, and started using it for my personal blog in pretty short order. Over the years, I had managed several websites on Joomla and Drupal, but by 2012 I was more comfortable with WordPress, and started building business sites on WordPress to get a side hustle going.
One of my first sites was for a greenhouse and we wanted to post a lot of photos. I began looking for an image optimization plugin, and didn’t find any that would work for us, so I rewrote the CW Image Optimizer to work on shared hosting. I decided to release it as EWWW Image Optimizer in case anyone else could use it, and now we have over a million sites using my “little side project”–which is, of course, no longer a side project!